Tag: Jay Morse blog

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Waking the Grand Wizard

Part 1

Around a hundred and ninety years ago, in a central Tennessee basin teeming with dogwood, red oak, and poplar-treed expanses splotched by canebrake and Bluestemmed barrens, the blacksmith William Forrest and his young wife Marian gave birth to Nathan Bedford Forrest, their second child. Ten more followed, as well as a move to Mississippi, where 13-year old Nathan soon found himself paterfamilias, his father dead and this being Mississippi in 1837 where, I like to think, they commonly used words like paterfamilias. Nathan, possessing only a rudimentary education as it were, quit school and went to work to support his family, though the primitive conditions of 1840-ish Mississippi alleviated him of many mouths to feed, five of his eleven siblings (including Fanny, his twin) killed off by yellow fever.

Nathan was an aggressive, resourceful kid, and legend has it that at twenty years of age, he shot and killed two men and, using throwing knives, injured two others, all brothers Matlock, avenging the murder of his uncle and employer, Jonathan. Apocryphal or not, Nathan was clearly a man of action: he took over his uncle’s livery and livestock business, married, moved to Memphis, and built an empire through his dealings in cotton plantations, livestock, real estate, and slaves. By 1859, Nathan was retired and had in his possession well over one million dollars. That’s twenty-seven million dollars in 2010 money, if we use the Consumer Price Index, but if we go with the more bourgeois Relative Share of Gross Domestic Product, Mr. Forrest was worth a little over three billion dollars, putting him just south of Misters Gates and Buffett on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men.

In November of 1860, America elected Abraham Lincoln president, and barely a month and a half later South Carolina – fearing the abolition of slavery – seceded from the Union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas quickly followed, and by April 12th, 1861, relations between the Union and the seven Confederate states had degenerated to an armed stand-off at Charleston, South Carolina, resolved (sort of) only when Edmund Ruffin, a scholarly 67 year-old farmer from Virginia, pulled a lanyard that lit a fuse and lobbed a mortar round from Fort Johnson, over Charleston Harbor and into the Union-occupied Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War.

Between April 17th and May 20th, Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina seceded, and on June 8, 1861, Tennesseans voted 2-to-1 to join suit. By mid-July billionaire Nathan Forrest enlisted, as a private, in the Tennessee Mounted Rifles. Four years later he was a three-star General, had been directly engaged with and fired upon by enemy forces almost one hundred and eighty times, taken over 31,000 prisoners, cemented his status as World’s Greatest Cavalryman, allegedly ordered or condoned the wholesale slaughter of surrendering (and defenseless) black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, and uttered the timeless adage “war means killing, and the way to kill is to get there first with the most men.” Lesser known, but of great importance to this story, are his post-Civil War activities: Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

And here is where I begin each morning: I leave my house in Tennessee at about 5:30 am, getting on the interstate at Exit 1, ensuring I stay left to avoid the tractor-trailers parked in the narrow shoulder overnight; head west on I-24 to exit 86, now in Kentucky; then drive south on Highway 41A amidst the closest thing we have to rush hour traffic. Across the street from Jenna’s Toy Box, recently put off-limits by the Commanding General not for their extensive porn-and-bong collection but for their equally extensive synthetic marijuana offerings, I make a right through Gate 5 and onto Fort Campbell, but only after showing my identification card to, more often than not, the contracted security guard and advice-dispensing Mr. Williams (“stay dry now!,” or “keep smilin’, you almost made it to Friday!”). From beginning to end, the road at Gate 5 – Forrest Road – is just nine-tenths of a mile.

But it’s not the length, I’m told, but rather what one does with it. And what Fort Campbell has done with it is put the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate – my office, the place where I spend about 60 hours a week doing my best to lead, guide, and mentor fairness, integrity, and, hopefully, justice – right at about the half-way point of Forrest Road, named after a man who, if we look through the Yankeeist of eyes, achieved vast wealth on the unwilling backs of black men, dedicated four years of his life fighting against America, then headed up a new organization that has spent the last century and a half inciting violence against just about anyone who wasn’t white and Christian.

Aside from a short, nondescript road at Ft. Campbell, Nathan Bedford Forrest is memorialized by, at a minimum, a town in Arkansas, a county in Mississippi, high schools in Tennessee and Florida, a park, a university building, monuments in Nashville; Selma, Alabama; and Rome, Georgia; over thirty historical markers throughout the state of Tennessee and at least one figure in pop culture (run, Forrest). He is a favored Son of Tennessee and of the South, and is remembered accordingly. But he has nothing to do with Fort Campbell, no connection to any unit ever garrisoned here. The Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne owe their lineage to, of all things, a Union unit from Wisconsin. The entirety of Forrest Road sits, in fact, in Kentucky, not in Tennessee.

Mumbai was once Bombay; Volgograd Stalingrad; and Istanbul Constantinople. Russell Jones (RIP) was known as Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, Joe Bananas, and, fleetingly, the Old Dirty Chinese Restaurant. It should be a minor inconvenience to rename a mile long stretch of asphalt on an Army base. But this is the South.

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The Ninth Life

My grandfather spent the first months of his life as a widower sleeping above the covers of his decades-old queen size bed. Changing the sheets required the initiative of his daughters; my grandfather felt that if he washed anything he would lose, forever, the pillow-case smell of his wife. He and my grandmother had been married some fifty years when she died over twelve years ago, and in some sense, I think, he has simply been waiting around to die.

Over the last few days, it seemed increasingly likely that day had come.  My grandfather isn’t supposed to have aspirin, but had unknowingly been swallowing 325 mg of the stuff each time he followed up his vanilla ice cream with an Alka Seltzer tablet.  The aspirin ate a hole in something, he started leaking blood internally, then throwing it up.

We have been down this road before.  Several times in the last few years, and a few isolated events over his lifetime, have prompted his five children to make the one- to seven-hour trek from the nether regions of Nevada to his hospital bedside, muscling past the hovering priest and fawning nurses (even in the throes of death, he’s a bit of a charming fellow).

But again my grandfather has defied the cumulative effects of age, odds, loneliness and preservatives; again his children have packed up and went back home, heads shaking in equal parts admiration and disbelief.  To be fair, for a man who subsists almost entirely on bear claws and Hot Pockets, every day he gets up is a spit in the face of the devil himself.

A funeral is an ablution for the life of man.  Tragic and cheerless for those who die young; a maudlin celebration for those whose lives have been full and satisfying, but an ablution regardless.  It is also, unfortunately, a chit you can use just once.  But why?  Why are there no eulogies for the living?

My grandfather has always been, with the exception of his brief hospital stays, in full control of his faculties.  He continues to hunt and ride horses even in his 87th year, walks daily, and possesses a wit that seems to only get more lascivious as he ages (he recently told his nurses he didn’t want an X-Ray because he was worried it would make him sterile).  He takes my grandmother with him just about everywhere he goes, she the permanent resident of the left side of a small oak box, he the would-be tenant of the right. He buys her flowers regularly. When he comes into town on cold-day errands he leaves grandma at his youngest child’s house so she won’t get cold, and if he wants to stay only briefly grandma provides a ready-made excuse: can’t stay long, I’ve got your grandmother in the car.

My grandfather is simple.  My gut tells me that definition means something different to you than it does to me, but I don’t know a better single word to convey my admiration for the man.  Dictionary-dot-com lists twenty-nine different uses, and of those I think the one coming closest is free of deceit or guile; sincere; unconditional.

A high-school graduate, in his lifetime he has been a first-generation American, a hair-tonic hocker, a newspaper boy, a retriever of moonshine for the drunks under Bayonne’s bridges, a sailor, a World War II veteran, a pipe-fitter, a miner, construction worker, heavy-machine operator and a member of the Greatest Generation.  He is a pioneer, part of the post-World War II westward migration; a cowboy, a hunter, an amateur rancher, artist, and leather-worker; a husband, father of five, grandfather to eighteen and great grandfather to sixteen (with number seventeen on the way).

He is also, for me, an unfalteringly good example of what it means to be a man.  He wishes ill-will to no one, and is the least judgmental person I know.  I have never heard him raise his voice and never heard him swear in anger.  He deflects praise, takes responsibility for his actions and expects others to do the same. His most prized possession – he told me once – is his family.  No contest.  I know every man sins, but I wager we could use both hands, less thumbs, to accurately account for the times in his life he has lied, cheated, or stolen (and make fists if you want to count the times he failed to correct it). He used to drink, daily, but when he realized he was an alcoholic he just quit.  No twelve-step program, no intervention, no relapse – he just quit.  Simple.

He uses words sparingly.  I once read Ernest Hemingway won a bet by writing a story with just six words (For sale: baby shoes.  Never worn); I think grandpa could give him a run for his money.   If something doesn’t sit well with him, he might say “that’s not right.”  Only later, after I began to develop my own moral compass, did I realize he didn’t mean “that’s incorrect,” but something much, much closer to

life is but a series of decisions, of interwoven threads not only keeping you tethered to the ground but keeping your friends and families close, close where they can pull you back down, if need be, or even give you yards of slack to make your own way.  If you are lucky, you can pull them right along with you, or let them lead you back on course.  But if you make that choice, or tolerate those who choose to make such decisions, even in passing, you might take those first steps down a path that ends someplace you just don’t want to be.

He grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, one of the most densely populated cities in America, but home is, and has been, a double-wide trailer at the end of a quarter-mile long dusty road in the high deserts of Nevada.  And though his blood is Irish, and his heart belongs to a dead German, his soul is unmistakably and firmly set in the salty dirt of the sagebrushed American West.  Here was – is – his dream: to own a horse, to be a cowboy, to raise a family and work the dirt and hunt and fish and never take more than you need and respect others and have your own space.  And he did it, he has it all – maybe not much to you and I, but it is everything he ever wanted.  Simple.

Josey Wales is one of my favorite fictional characters, and I have only recently put a fine point on the reasons why: but for the six-shooters and the inclination towards serial killing, he is a man who reminds me of my grandfather.  I think he and Josey would get along right well.  Neither say much, but say what they’re going to do and do what they say.  Both kind to animals and lovers of the earth, they have understated senses of humor, respect other people and above all else love their families.

Appropriate, then, to borrow Josey’s simple words for a fallen companion and put them to my living grandfather: I rode with him, and I got no complaints.

 

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Curtains for the Zen Dog

I killed my dog on Monday.  To be more precise, I suppose, I told a vet to kill him.  I wasn’t the trigger puller, or in this case the plunger-pusher, but it felt like it.

Late Sunday night Mojo pissed himself, on his bed, and then couldn’t stand up to move out of the mess.  For almost 18 hours his pulse rate was at a drug-influenced 170-200 beats per minute, but uninhibited it raced to 300.  It should have been a steady 110.  On the way back to the clinic Monday evening, the cardiologist told me he had collapsed once again, and though when his heart was pulsating in the lower range of that 170-300 frame he was literally pulling the vet techs around the hospital floor, they had to give him drugs more and more frequently and his lows were causing him more and more distress.  Three of the four valves of his heart were paper thin.  “It is not a bad thing,” she said, “to put down an 11 ½ year old Great Dane.”

I know this, I told her.  Most Great Danes live 8-10 years, frequently have hip and heart problems, and lug around significantly less than 180 pounds.  But this was my friend, a dog who has been, with the exception of his several brief stays with the Jenks’ and two long ones with my mom, my roommate and companion for the last eleven years.  That’s almost 30% of my life.  It’s 73% of the time I have been in the army.  It would be 15% of my entire time on earth should I live to my 74th birthday, the average age of an American male.  Euthanizing an 11 1/2 year old Great Dane might not be a bad thing, but it is certainly not a good one.

In his younger years Mojo was, in the most emphatic sense of the word, a beast.  He would pull me on my mountain bike, on a dead-on sprint, for almost two miles.  More than once he pulled me off of it.  He inadvertently broke my mother’s forearm in a game of tag.  He could play touch rugby for hours, was a decent hiker but a terrible swimmer (distances were limited to however far he had to go to drape himself over me floating on my pool chair).  He was in a few fist-fights and liked being around fringe characters.  He possessed a pair of the biggest testicles you ever saw, and didn’t mind me showing them off.  He was a great roommate. Though he didn’t bark much, and would never bite anyone, if he was home I never needed to close (let alone lock) a back door when I was at work for the day.  He was house-trained so quickly and so well that I once mistakenly blamed one of my friends for drunkenly wetting my bed when I was out of town for a weekend.  And if he did make a mistake, he always told me so, usually as soon as I walked in the door. He could be rough around the edges, I will grant you.  His breath was atrocious. He sometimes picked on smaller dogs, leaving me feeling like the guy who shows up at parties with the belligerent frat boy no one really likes but pretends to.  He was never accused of being brilliant; his sheer dumbness, in fact, may have been his most endearing quality.  But his drawbacks became nothing but background noise when he leaned against you or dropped his enormous head into your lap and stared at you with his slightly crossed eyes.

Mojo had taken well to our Capital Hill neighborhood, and no one had perfected pretentiousness better than he.  I would leave him in the front yard while I sat on the porch, reading and smoking a cigar, my view of Mojo obstructed by a hedge row but knowing exactly how he was sitting: front legs stretched out, head up and nose elevated slightly above parallel, hind quarters off to his left.  Sphinx-like, were the Sphinx dressed in business casual.  One could not walk by without noticing Mojo, sitting in the sun, a Zen dog in an ambitious city.  People would, more often than not, talk to him.

“You are huge.”

“You are a horse.”

“Oh. My. God.  You are beautiful.”

 Not once in two years did Mojo rise from his position to meet a dog-less person (and those with dogs usually moved along quickly).  He rarely bothered to even make eye contact, and would frequently shift his gaze further away from whomever was standing in front of him, his answer to all compliments uniform: “I know this.  Now please move along so I can ignore someone else.”

But now here we sit, facing one another, him on a lowered stainless steel cart, me on the floor with my legs under him, one arm around his neck and the other scratching his belly.  He looks sad, but I don’t know if it’s because he is, in fact, sad, or if it’s a product of me bawling childishly.  I know we can’t sit here all night long, but I’m not sure what else to do. I impulsively take a picture of him with my cell phone and immediately regret it. The picture is stygian, his face long and skinny and cartoonish like a Pat Oliphant sculpture.  A few friends are here with me, and I ask them to step outside so I can I tell my dog, in private, how much I love him and how thankful I am to have had him as a friend for so long.  I hug him once for my mom and once for me.  He barely raises his head.  And then death knocks on the door.

Death, oddly, looks an awful lot like a thirty-something Connie Chung. She carries in her hand three syringes: one large filled with a milky fluid, one large filled with something appearing to be watered-down Pepto Bismol, and one small.  The first shot, death/Connie Chung tells me, is anesthesia, which will put Mojo to sleep so he feels no pain or discomfort.  The second, and I think the third – I’m not really listening at this point and so I don’t know what she said – induce cardiac arrest.  What I do know is that there is asleep and there is dead.  Asleep feels like Mojo asleep.  I can see his chest heaving, still feel his heart racing.  My own heart races; I want to stop this.

“Hey!  Ha Ha!  Just kidding!  Sometimes Mojo and I like to play jokes on each other!  He licks my face when I’m asleep, I pretend I’m going to euthanize him!”

But Connie Chung is quick, and the second syringe is emptied and then the third.  And though I am familiar with my dog asleep, dead is another matter.  I feel the full weight of his anvil-sized head, see and hear his last breath, feel the cart move as his 180 pound body, for the first and only time muscleless, fully relents to gravity.  A forearm slips off the table.

I am, probably, Godless.  But I love life, and karma, and symmetry, and existentialism is a pretty cool concept and maybe just maybe Elysium is a real place.  I like to think so.  And sometimes life gives us those little reminders that we all come and go, and good often replaces bad, and trees grow in dirt, and being with is usually a better thing than being without.  If you’re lucky, the timing of these reminders is such that it’s harder to write it off as mere happenstance when it is so obviously and joyously karma or symmetry or, if you prefer, God.  Such is my Mojo-less ride home, when I call my good friend Patrick, waking him because he’s been up all night with his wife Andrea helping her to deliver their new daughter.  I had previously suggested they name her Patandrea, but they’ve gone instead with Fiona.  I jokingly tell Pat that Fiona’s and Mojo’s spirits have passed one another in the other-world, and we should hope Mojo’s spirit hasn’t inserted itself into Fiona’s body.

Pat says she could do a lot worse.

 

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Five Nights in May

When I was 18 my cousin Mike and I had plans to see every major league baseball stadium in America.  There were 28 teams at the time – the Rockies and Marlins were added when I was a senior in college – and we were going to borrow a motor home and spend our summer driving across the country.  We didn’t make the trip, of course, to my regret (another trip I regret not taking: floating, with my cousin Joey, the Walker River from its source in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to its terminus at the base of the Wassuk Range near Hawthorne, Nevada.  Still time for that one).

Whatever stopped us?  I don’t remember.  I suspect money, bravery, lack of a motor home.  Perhaps a girl or two.  But I have, in those twenty years since 1989, slowly ticked America’s baseball stadiums off my list.  I remember them all: the cavernous Metrodome, its awful gymnasium-feel compensated for by Raul Mondesi, cannon tattooed on his right arm, roving right field; Yankee Stadium, her welcoming denizens telling the Twins fans – a pastoral family of four – to “sit the f**k down you corn-eating f**cks,”; Turner Field in Atlanta where my friend Jeff and I were able to sell tickets for the seats next to us to two lovely coeds who later beat the snot out of us at pop-a-shot; Citizen’s Bank Park in Philadelphia against the rival Mets, the stadium electric everywhere except right next to me, my girlfriend at the time knowing this is it; the hallowed ground of Wrigley Field, in my outfield seats early enough to get a little buzz going and to cheer Sammy Sosa as he sprinted to centerfield and back, finding pure joy in the sunshine and ivied walls and  camaraderie of the bleachers (the same fans would constantly remind Sammy – no brain surgeon – of how many outs there were).

Nothing reflects American cities, and her citizens, like a baseball stadium.  The NFL may be the biggest money-maker, but the stadiums are generic affairs, interchangeable monstrosities housing interchangeable 120 x 53 yard fields treaded upon by superhumans unlike you and me and occupied, for most of the league’s cities, just eight days a year.  Sometimes they host soccer games.  Blech.

But baseball stadiums are different.  They are personal, revered.  They are America’s churches, our young nation’s versions of Westminster Abbey and the Arc de Triomphe and the Parthenon.  Fenway Park in Boston was built in 1912, Wrigley in 1914.  And it’s no coincidence all the new stadiums are built to look old, classic, rustic.  Even the field dimensions are personal, and no two in America are the same.  I have seen twenty-two of them since that failed summer plan, and because I have been blessed with canceled classes for the next four days, this week I will see three more as I visit five stadiums in five nights: Kansas City, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Des Moines (so it’s not a major league team, but it is between Chicago and home).

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Albert Pujols, the Poverty Line, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Being excited about Major League Baseball in the first week of May is equivalent to being excited about your one boring friend’s New Year’s resolution to “really spice things up this year.”  But what if he really meant it?  What if he did something to prove it?  What if he jumped out of an airplane, or decided to walk across Utah, or invented heelies for adults and then cruised around the mall?  Forget the creepy factor – would you stay and watch?  Would you congratulate him for his bravery?

You would if you were Kansas City and your boring friend was the Royals.  For game one – a Monday night in KC (a school night!) – 22,000 fans not only stayed the duration to watch Zach Grienke pitch a 6 hit, 10 strikeout, complete-game shutout against the White Sox, but gave him a standing ovation both after the 8th inning and before the ninth and didn’t sit down until he finished getting hugs and high-fives from his teammates after the game.  Grienke threw his second-to-last pitch 95 miles an hour, prompting the crowd to erupt once again and putting a smile on my face that didn’t leave until I headed for my car.

This is baseball.  I can admit that it might not be a sport (if you can smoke and play it, it’s probably a recreation.  Plus it’s a haven for professional athletes possessing that rare combination of fat and weak – google Bartolo Colon, Matt Stairs, Sidney Ponson, David Wells, Antonio Alfonseca, John Kruk), but watching the game being played correctly – seeing a diving grab up the middle, a back handed flip for a double play, a hitter absolutely baffled by a change up, a ball hit so hard you know, you just know, it’s gone as soon as it comes off the bat, well that’s a beautiful thing.  A thing so beautiful it brings me together with Emo teens sporting awful forward swept hair dos and wearing spandex-laced denim jeans and converse All Stars; young couples wearing matching Royals jerseys, “Soria” scrawled across the back; old women using walkers with punctured tennis balls cushioning the supports; that girl wearing the “shuck me, suck me, eat me raw” t-shirt; and kids, kids everywhere – that is a beautiful thing.  A necessary thing.

On the way out of town, driving I-70 East on a straight shot towards St. Louis I listened to a man call in to the Kansas City am radio sports station and share how he listened to the game with his son, them sitting in his truck outside his house because his “line of work keeps us right above the poverty line” and am radio was the only way he could experience a game; sharing that moment with his son and explaining to him what it meant for Zach Grienke to pitch a complete game shut-out, what it meant for 22,000 fans to not leave their seats on a Monday night – a school night! – in the first week of May, what it meant to him to have that moment of serendipity, bliss, and nostalgia because that’s what he did with his own dad, sit on the tool box in the back of his dad’s truck on his boyhood farm and listen to George Brett or Hal McRae hit bombs, listen to a crowd roar when Dan Quisenberry came in to finish the game.  This is baseball.

There is a man in St. Louis named Albert Pujols, and aside from the unfortunate pronunciation of his last name, he is revered by Cardinals fans as, perhaps, the second coming.  There are not many like him in the sport – Derek Jeter in New York probably; Barry Bonds a few years ago in San Francisco maybe – who command the respect and adoration of an entire city.  Albert Pujols, because of what he can do to a baseball, because he can spot the rotation of the threads on a ball less than three inches in diameter coming at him from 60 feet away at 90 miles an hour and can not only tell exactly where that ball is going to cross the plate but can hit it, absolutely murder it, sending it over the outfield fence and causing thousands upon thousands of people to leap from their seats in synonymous joy.  What is this?  What void does Albert Pujols fill in those lives, what is this thing he possesses that brings together people, old and young, bad clothes and good?  What is this thing that causes Bob from St. Louis to give me, unsolicited, $90 tickets along the third base line so I too can hang around for three and a half hours in order to share in this thing, watching Albert Pujols crush a baseball 370 feet in the bottom of the ninth inning, game out of reach but no one leaving just so they – we – can talk about him on the way back to our cars or busses or trains?

In the early 1940’s Abraham Maslow posed a theory that human beings have stratified needs, psychological needs causing you to first meet the necessities of life, air and food and water and sex and sleep, and not until these were met could you move onward and upward to things like security and health and friendship and intimacy, confidence and self-esteem, and not until you met these needs could you move to the top, to spiritualization and religion and morality.  But I disagree.  I don’t think it’s a pyramid, I don’t think it’s a scale.  There is something to Albert Pujols, to baseball, to watching Zach Grienke pitch a complete game shutout the first week of May, to sharing the roar of a crowd and the success of your home team as you sit in your old truck on your dirt farm with your son at your side, school night be damned, there is something fundamental to this feeling, this necessity, on par with the very necessities of life.  This is baseball.

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The High Life

The Gateway Arch rises from the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, implausible and angled and silver and alien, instantly evoking in me memories of The White Mountains, a favorite childhood book about extraterrestrials come to subjugate Earth’s youth.  Designed in 1947 by Eero Saarinen (he of the TWA terminal at JFK; Washington Dulles Airport; and the “Tulip Chair.” Like on Star Trek.  You know the one) and built from 1963 to 1965, it is as wide at the base as it is tall, and it’s the tallest monument in America – at 630 feet about 80 feet taller than the Washington Monument and almost twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty.  Here I met a days-old college grad, on his way from Pennsylvania to California to be a back country guide at Yosemite; spied a cigarette smoking and Diet Coke drinking Amish couple; and chatted (listened, mostly) to a uniformly khaki and polo-dressed couple from St. George, Utah, returning to the Arch twenty years after their honeymoon (“the trees have grown so big!”).

You can stand on the ground, immediately under the Arch and staring upwards with your head rocked back so far it’s impossible to keep your mouth closed, or you can ride to the top in surreal, miniature and plastic sterile pods, folded up in a windowless egg with a man about my age wearing a flannel shirt, too-tight jeans and a Donald Duck wristwatch.  It truly is a marvel, and standing in the 17’ wide top of the Arch, looking down on the flooded river and surprisingly sleepy downtown, provides the proper motivation to think bigger than you really are, or should be.

So on my way east, in the beginnings of an off-and-on three day rainstorm and mulling over my doctor friend’s posit that “veterans and heroin addicts are impossible to kill,” I called the Cincinnati Reds office and asked them for a press pass for that night’s game.  I am a writer, no?  No, no, not a “blogger.”  A writer.  A reporter on life, just taking a little baseball and hotdogs and apple pie (and Guantanamo, and bailouts, and the False Reports of the Secularization of America! and right-to-life and Iowa Negotiated Hog Report and the Fairness Doctrine – the Midwest has a lot of a.m. radio) middle-of-America trip and thought I’d stop by your nice little stadium and then write a story about it. I have, like, 60 readers. Or so.

An optimist would assume the worst one could say is “no,” but Josh from the Reds, he no optimist, offered a much, much more thorough response.  “We don’t credential bloggers.  And you’re coming tonight?  You wouldn’t just show up at someone’s house and expect to be let in, would you.”  Not a “would you?” less Josh indicate an interrogative and an opportunity to respond, but would you as in who do you think you are and who do you think you’re talking to? And we don’t credential BLOGGERS.

Not credentialing bloggers is good policy, no doubt, but advance warning is necessary?  Seriously?  Are there no Mormons in Cincinnati?  No Jehovah’s?  No Girl Scouts, no Little League, no Amway?  I would – do – expect to be let in if I just showed up at someone’s house, and most people I know would probably let you in.  But lesson learned: prior to watching Bronson Arroyo give up 9 runs in three outs (that’s called karma, Josh from the Reds), I emailed the White Sox and changed my approach.  Not a blogger, but a writer for a website, and here’s my link, and I’m seeing five games in five nights, the last night in Des Moines (Des Moines!), and I don’t want access to players but maybe hang out with real writers and see what they do and how they do it and it would make a good story and there’s a war on, don’t you know?

I did not, in fact, invoke the “war clause,” but it was unnecessary, as Ray Garcia and Scott Reifert are not only optimists but are also Major League Baseball’s finest Vice President of Communications/Coordinator of Media Services and Champions of the Little Man and . . . they gave me a ticket.  And a media package, and access to batting practice where I could size up Carlos Quentin (he’s big) and A.J. Pierzynski (bigger) and even stand next to Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of both the White Sox and the Chicago Bulls and the 52nd richest man in America.  And I paid them back by ruining Mark Buehrle’s Perfect Game.

Not “perfect game,” as in the sun is shining but it’s not too hot and it’s not crowded so we can hang our feet over the seat in front of us and the beerman knows us by name and we can see perfectly Ichiro’s laser throw to third holding the runner at second and there’s a beautiful human being at your side and we just can’t stop smiling but perfect game as in Perfect Game.  As in

 

scorecard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and no walks and no errors and not even a sniff of Detroit’s batters figuring out Buehrle’s speed and timing and location.

Athletes in general are a superstitious lot, baseball players particularly so, and a Perfect Game is an untouchable, an unspeakable.  It has happened just 17 times in the 132 years of the sport; they are magical and to see one, to be in the presence of greatness, of such infinitesimal rarity would feel like that first time you were twelve was it? maybe eleven and jumped off a cliff, it seemed so high and you were so scared but you jumped anyway and plunged into the water, kicking like a madman to get to the top but doing your best to appear nonchalant, so nonchalant when you yelled at your buddy still on the cliff it’s easy don’t be a baby – just like that but better and I know I shouldn’t but I had to send a text to a friend anyway to let him know i’m in chic watching a perf game thru 6 and he rightly, rightly responded you just effed it up go get a beer.

But it’s a text! A text is not spoken, a text should not violate the rule, but the very next hitter hit the ball on a rope to the first baseman – he caught it for an out – and the next batter hit a double into the gap and then Buehrle walked two batters and the bases were loaded.  And I ruined Mark Buehrle’s perfect game.

Major League baseball stadiums are cathedrals and Perfect Games are unspeakables and Jerry Reinsdorf is the 52nd richest man in the United States but if it’s Middle America that you seek, you need go no further than the High Life Lounge in Des Moines, Iowa.  There are decent chain restaurants in just about every city in America, chain restaurants with good service, and good food, and a good atmosphere, places like The Rock Bottom Brewery or Old Chicago’s, but chains are, after all, by nature impersonal.

But there are also pseudo-chain, shadow-chain back-alley, dark corner, cracked sidewalk establishments in every town, disconnected commercially but a veritable network emotionally, spiritually, celestially, where it’s not that you don’t want to be seen, but rather don’t want it to seem like you want to be seen yet relish that moment when you can just let it slip out that you’re in the know: let’s meet at _____ and it’s that much richer if the invitee needs directions.  Bob Dobb’s in Tucson and the Cap Lounge in DC and the Beach Tavern in Tacoma and – you know the one in your own town.

The High Life sits on the corner of 2nd and Market in Des Moines and the $2 PBRs taste like holy water after shelling out $8 for keep the change beers at Kauffman, Busch, Great American, and US Cellular stadiums.  There is shag carpet on the floor and dirty brown formica covering the bar and black naugahyde stools pushed up to it.  It has eight taps visible, one each Old Style and Pabst Blue Ribbon, two Lite, three Miller High Life and one Guinness, off by itself at the end of the bar like an accountant at a teamster’s party.  The décor is late 70’s and the clientele not much later, and I wish I could tell you it’s been a Des Moines staple for that long, but it’s been around since . . . 2005.

Yet, it was a good beginning to the Iowa Cubs, because if the Cubby Bear on Addison puts you in the proper mindset for Wrigley, the High Life Lounge puts you in the proper mindset for AAA baseball.  Though just one step down from the bigs, and for many organizations just an hour or two down an interstate, the atmosphere at AAA baseball is closer kin to your kid’s little league game.

This is truly a family affair.  I heard a little girl in line next to me tell her mommy that man is wearing a purse (it’s a man-purse, honey, and don’t point at the man); bought a $12 ticket that let me sit anywhere in the park (even the cheapest $4 tickets are within foul ball souvenir territory); envied old couples bundled up in shared blankets; and watched eleven – eleven – First Pitches: two small children, a local congressman, three people appearing on behalf of the local ALS, a local boy-makes good with the World Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, and four others who threw out their First Pitches so quickly and anemically I failed to either hear their names or write them down.

And all of them, every last one, even the little girl who took a full two minutes and the announcer’s public encouragement to just throw it to the man in blue standing behind the plate, everyone of them was applauded roundly.  Is this baseball?  Or is this Iowa or anywhere else in the Midwest or America for that matter?  Every half inning had a contest, a throw-it-through the tires or musical chairs in the oversized blow-up baseball gloves or a scholarship raffle or little kids racing wearing huge, baggy clothes and both t-shirts and hotdogs shot out of a compressed air gun – hot dogs, and more hot dogs and more hot dogs and this is America.

All American sporting events start with the Anthem, but it is endemic to baseball.  It is usually performed well, sometimes especially so.  But occasionally, I think, it is superlative, and if done correctly it can do to you what that Perfect Game does to you, what that first post-cliff dive gulp of air or that random where did that come from? memory of that first really, really good kiss can do to you.  On this day, a cloudy, windy, slightly cold night in Des Moines, Iowa, a young fellow – challenged, I think; touched, exceptional, mentally retarded – played the American anthem on his Casio keyboard.  And it was beautiful.  And no one, not a soul, not a breeze, not a flap of flag or drop of cup or cough or awkward laugh escaped during this mistake-ridden rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, and I, after five days of baseball, and America, and occasional loneliness,            just             felt             good.

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Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger

Fourteen years ago this summer I suffered through the most miserable two and a half months of my life – 17 days each in the soupy July air of Fort Benning, Georgia; the frying pan-hot Chihuahuan Desert of eastern New Mexico; the demoralizingly steep ascents of the Appalachians; and the dysenteric swamps of the Florida panhandle; all largely on a meal a day and little to no sleep.  The reward was a Ranger tab, yet conventional Army wisdom still derisively labels me a “leg” – a non-Airborne qualified soldier.  But now here I am back at Ft. Benning hoping to remedy my deficiencies, this time at the U.S. Army Airborne School.  I am the senior officer in my class, and one of just two Majors out of over five hundred students.  The vast majority of my classmates are younger than my youngest sister; many, I find, were born the year I graduated from high school.  The training is geared specifically towards these Privates who are, regrettably, prone to not be where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there, and not wearing the uniform they are supposed to be in.  For their trespasses I am yelled at (always respectfully, never directly), forced to do push-ups, flutter-kicks, ski-jumpers, and the grossly underestimated “overhead clap.”[1]

I am, as some have reminded me, no longer twenty-four.  I know this.  I am thirty-seven.  But no one here knows this, so on the outside I am a rock.  I always do my “optional” ten pull-ups and twenty push-ups each time we are released for the day.  I sound off vigorously with an “Airborne!” each time I hit the ground.  I never complain, I never doze off in class, I do everything Sergeant Airborne tells me to do, enthusiastically and without delay.  But inside I am dying.  The bottoms of my feet hurt.  The side of my neck is friction-burned from the straps of the mock-parachutes.  I have fire ant bites on my legs and hands.  I cannot feel, inexplicably, the this little piggy had none toe on my right foot.  I quietly await what, by all indications, seems to be the early stages of a hernia, and I think I pulled a muscle in my triceps opening my hotel room door.  But still I am here, and after two weeks of training and five jumps from a C-130 Hercules airplane, I will no longer be a dirty, nasty, non-Airborne qualified leg Ranger.

Zero Day and Ground Week

Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger, where have you been?

Around the world and back again.

Despite some anxiety – this will be the first time I’ve been around Joe[2] on a regular basis in over three years – I show up as close as possible to the Zero Day “no later than” report time of 1200 hours.  I am a cagey veteran, a veritable old-timer given the apparent average age of my classmates, and my Army experience has taught me that reporting any earlier than absolutely necessary only means you’ll either get tasked to go do something or just end up waiting that much longer.  I file into a classroom with about 200 other soldiers, holding in my hand my orders directing me to Ft. Benning; an Airborne physical stating I tested negative for HIV, have no blood in my stool, and am generally an able-bodied male; and an age waiver signed by my boss stating that despite the age limit of thirty-six, I should be allowed to attend Airborne training.  The soldiers around me are clearly brand-new to the Army – many having just arrived from Sand Hill, the basic training area for infantrymen – and do not need an age waiver.  The soldier sitting to my right appears to have a zit for each of my years.  I hear an audible gasp from the group as I stand after the administrative sergeant calls out “any majors here today?”  The NCO, a red-headed Sergeant First Class whom I immediately dislike, calls out for the other officer ranks, then directs us all in the completion of four forms he had previously passed out.

 

“Airborne, take everything off your desk and put it under your seat.  Everything Airborne!  Get everything off your desk or else you jackasses will fuck everything up, and I don’t have the time to be fucking with you.  Now, reach in that folder and take out THE TOP SHEET AND THE TOP SHEET ONLY.  On that first sheet, fill out block one where it says ‘last name.’  In this block you should put your last name and your last name only.  Airborne!  Did I tell you to fill out block two?  Don’t get ahead of me airborne, because you’ll just fuck everything up.  You don’t do shit until I tell you to!  Now, in BLOCK TWO” – he sends a condescending look in the direction of the overly ambitious jackass – “put down your first name and your first name only.  Fill it out in standard Army black letters and in ENGLISH ONLY.  I don’t want to see no Japanese hieroglyphics.”

It takes us over an hour to do what should have taken ten minutes, a trend that continues for the remainder of my time here.  I have to show, for the six hours of Zero Day I have spent at Airborne School, a helmet, a moldy canteen, a sunburn and an order to show up early Monday morning.  It’s going to be a long three weeks.

The Army frequently uses the “crawl, walk, run” method of instruction, which essentially means we train to the lowest common denominator, and so we spend most days crawling like a figurative nine-month old.  Though I am staying in Officer’s Quarters away from the Bravo Company area, where the soldiers sleep, I have to report each morning at 0450 hours for “forced hydration.”  This is where we stand around the second floor of the barracks (we’re in second platoon – note the symmetry) holding a full canteen of water until Sergeant Airborne shows up, reels off a few disparaging remarks, and then tells us to “DRINK UP AIRBORNE.”  We then guzzle the entire canteen.  After a few minutes, we solemnly move downstairs and outside to wait in formation with the rest of the company.  The cadre waits inside until the last possible minute (I went into their office one morning and found them sleeping, sprawled out like a bunch of cats), yelling through an open window if they need to talk to any particular soldier.

Sergeant Airborne yelling out the window for a specific student is one of my favorite parts of Airborne School.  It is five am, five hundred students have just guzzled a canteen full of water, and we all know we will stand around for approximately thirty minutes waiting for the cadre to come outside and run us to the training area.  This routine accommodates that basic human need for interaction, even at five am, and the company area quickly comes alive with human chatter, sounding like cicadas emerging from their seventeen year sleep.  Conversation is stopped only (but always) whenever we hear one of the windows slide open, Sergeant Airborne’s head emerging to yell out a roster number: “Charlie Three One Seven!”  Immediately five hundred voices respond.  “CHARLIE THREE ONE SEVEN!”  The cicada love song then resumes, and I giggle internally.

The main purpose of Ground Week seems to be to teach us how to fall down correctly, employing the “PLF” – the parachute landing fall.  In short, this consists of landing with your feet and knees tightly together, and hitting, preferably consecutively, your five “points of contact”: the balls of your feet, the outside of your calf, your thigh, your butt, and then your pull-up muscle, hopefully exposed by you keeping your elbows together in front of you and high up above your face.  This sequence of events, developed in the 1940’s, is the basis for the Army-specific directive, to “get your head out of your fourth point of contact.”  Feel free to adopt it into your own library of colloquialisms.  Ideally, the PLF will save you from serious injury, because the T-10 Delta parachute – a version of which has also been around since the 1940’s – is designed to get you to the ground safely, but more importantly, as quickly as possible.

This is not the landing you’ve seen on television, where a rainbow-clad skydiver pulls on toggles just before impact, hitting the ground running, yet softly, like a Pelican landing on terra firma.  This parachute was designed with the soldier in mind, specifically the enemy soldier, who is probably shooting at you as you fall from the sky, so getting down quickly is of utmost importance.  The trade-off is that you hit the ground harder than you’d like to, and to be able to properly minimize the impact is a good skill.  So we practice falling down.  Again.  And again, and again.  We practice falling down from our standing position.  We practice falling down from a 2’ wall.  We practice falling down while sliding on a cable.  We practice falling down facing forwards, facing sideways, facing backwards.  We practice falling down moving in all directions while sliding on the cable.  To emphasize the importance of keeping feet and knees together, we bunny-hop around the practice pit with our legs welded together, like we’re training for a gunny sack race but can’t find a gunny sack.  Not wearing underwear was a decision considerably lacking in foresight, as the sweat building up in my man-regions has nowhere to go.

We spend the last day of Ground Week jumping out of the 34’ Tower, the first occasion where I feel like I’m doing something kind of cool.  We do it both “Hollywood” – wearing only the parachute harness and a reserve parachute strapped in front of you – and “combat load,” which includes all of the above plus a thirty-five pound rucksack hanging from your waist.  Once we’re geared up, we walk up five flights of stairs, where a Sergeant Airborne hooks our harnesses to a pulley resting on a cable suspended 34’ off the ground.  Once hooked up, Sergeant Airborne gives a smack on the ass, indicating it is now time for you to jump out the door.  I give a vigorous kick and throw myself into a tight body position – chin tucked into chest, elbows in tight, feet and knees together.  I fall for just a fraction of a second until the harness catches, and then slide down the cable to other students waiting to unhook me.  With the exception of jumping off a tower, this is not a pleasurable experience.

If you’d like to get a taste of this, here’s a suitable recreation:  Take two seat belts, run them between your legs and then over your shoulder.  Fasten both, ensuring a buckle is digging into each clavicle.  Now squat down, and have your buddy cinch the belts up real tight.  Now stand up.  If you are unable to stand completely upright, then you’ve done it correctly (if, however, you feel your scrotum being pinched in between a belt and your thigh, you probably have some adjusting to do).  Now go get a computer monitor – not a flat screen, but one of the old school big ones.  Fill it with sand, and hang it from your waist.  Take two more seat belts, and run them through the two existing belts, right about at the front of your shoulders.  Make sure that when these belts extend straight up, your head doesn’t fit easily between them.  You want to reproduce the feeling of having your neck filleted as the straps rapidly shift from front to rear.  Now go walk up five flights of stairs.  Tie your two shoulder belts to the railing.  Jump off.  Repeat ad nauseum.

Tower Week

Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger, how did you go?

In a C-130, flying low.

 

The highlight of Tower Week is supposed to be the 250’ tower, where some students are slowly reeled up by a cable hooked to a parachute, and then dropped.  Think the Free Fall ride at Six Flags, and you’ll have the visual.  But we’re on a shortened training schedule, both because of a post-wide “Safety Day” and because of the four-day Memorial Day weekend, so the Tower is scrapped.

Instead we do a lot more hanging around, sitting in the bleachers and bullshitting in between either Sergeant Airborne or some uptight student yelling at us to “shut the fuck up.”  And for the majority of our down time, I’m pretty happy, because being around Joe again is invigorating.  Though my description at the end of this essay might leave you somewhat hesitant about the kismet awaiting Joe, have no doubt – he’s someone you want on your team.  And Joe is funny.  There are two female ROTC cadets in our platoon, both under 21 and attractive.  They are the object of much affection, and watching and listening to the mating call of Joe is hilarity of the highest order.  One afternoon I overhear two Marines one-upping each other in their efforts to impress Female Cadet, the winner clearly the Marine who proudly states he once teabagged[3] an anthill for $100.

We’ve now spent almost eight days together, for extended hours, and the student appointed as my squad leader annoys me.  He’s a 39 year old National Guard E7 from Oklahoma, and though his hayseed routine was initially endearing, it’s quickly become tiring.  He is a brownnoser, a Spotlight Ranger, a suckass, a sycophant, and has chosen Airborne School as his forum to display his leadership skills.  He also lacks what we call “situational awareness.”  One morning, after several rear PLFs, a Sergeant Airborne asked us if we wanted to do more.  My E7 responded affirmatively, the only one of 500 students.  Not like in “hooah Sergeant Airborne, you can’t smoke me!” but like in “shucks Sergeant Airborne, I sure would like to practice one more time.”  Later in the day, while assisting soldiers, he began calling off everyone’s number before they slid down the apparatus, as if the Sergeant Airborne was illiterate (our roster numbers are painted in big black letters on both the front and back of our helmet) and the student was mute.  Here’s our conversation, verbatim:

“Sergeant, if you feel the need to call out each person’s roster number, then just have them do it.”

“Oh no sir, I’m good, it’s not bothering me.”

“But it’s bothering me.”

On the last training day before Jump Week, I lock my keys in my truck at approximately 0440 am.  We spend all morning in our Physical Training uniforms, first conducting a company run and then, for no apparent reason, walking through an outdoor shower.  This is fine for all the Army soldiers, not so fine for the Marines.  The Army PT uniform consists of a thick gray t-shirt and black water repellant shorts.  The Marine Corps PT uniform, on the other hand, is a thread-bare thin olive drab t-shirt and a pair of short silkies,[4] and the cold water additive has rendered the rest of us observers at an impromptu spring-breakish scene.  My Marine Corps platoon sergeant looks like he’s been shrink-wrapped.  I can tell his religion.  After about 20 minutes, he tells the formation that some people are a little uncomfortable around the wet Marines (I have to admit, it’s difficult not to stare), and tells all his mates to use their canteens to discretely cover themselves.  So now I have about 10 strapping Marines (they’re all Force Recon guys) walking around holding their canteens below their waist like fig leaves.  They look ridiculous.

We end the morning (and the day) with a platoon photograph.  We arrange ourselves from tallest to shortest.  I put myself in front of three or four guys who I’m fairly certain are taller than I.  My weekend safety brief to all the soldiers consists of “don’t be a jackass.”  I hope I can follow my own advice.

At 8:30 pm, about two hours after calling “Pop-a-Lock,” I am visited by a tricked-out Jeep Wrangler with no visible company logo.  Out steps a 350 pound kid in jeans and a sleeveless tee (not the homemade type, but purchased, indicated by the hemmed arm-holes), white deodorant residue both hanging from the hairs protruding from his armpits and spread liberally across the sides of his shirt, markings of the hard day’s work put in by his mammoth and pendulous arms.  He sticks an air bag into the door jamb of my truck, inflates it enough so he can reach a beefed-up clothes hangar through the crack, and then unlocks my door.  Sixty-five dollars for about thirty seconds of work – I hope jump week goes a little better.

Jump Week

Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger, how’d you get down?

In a T-10 Charlie, big and round.

I am not afraid.  Though I’m uncomfortable in the harness, I am not sweating.  My heart rate is normal.  I am essentially indifferent as the loudspeaker calls out “CHALK FIVE, STAND UP AND FACE THE AIRFIELD.  KEEP YOUR FEET AND KNEES TOGETHER AIRBORNE.  IT’S GO TIME.”

It’s about noon inside the chute warehouse, and an overhead door slides up, revealing a C-130 Hercules rolling up the tarmac towards us, her four turboprop engines whining noisily.  She turns the corner, the lowering tailgate visible through the combined heat waves from the ground and the aircraft itself.  We shuffle towards the back of the plane, entering in reverse order and passing two or three of our instructors, who will act as Jump Masters on our flight.

As soon as we are seated, the plane begins to roll, and Jump Master beings his routine.

“TEN MINUTES!”

Sixty of us call back, “TEN MINUTES TEN MINUTES TEN MINUTES!”

Jump Master shouts, “GET READY!”

It has not been ten minutes; closer to thirty seconds.  As he shouts his second command, the jump door of the aircraft rolls up, revealing the passing tree line below us, and the tenor inside the belly of the airplane changes significantly.  A soldier sitting across from me turns his head from the open door to me, his mouth and eyes wide open.  I give him the “OK” sign, and we sixty call back “GET READY!”  I smile at the soldier.  This will be a breeze, a walk in the park.  We are trained, we are ready, equipment always works, and we have a reserve anyway.

Jump Master calls back to us, “INBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!”  We repeat it back to him, and the first five jumpers in the two inner rows of cargo net seats struggle to their feet.

“OUTBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!”  I repeat his command as I stand myself.

“HOOK UP!”  Jump Master simultaneously makes a sign-language “X” with both of his hands, and we twenty standing jumpers move to unhook our static lines from our reserves,[5] placing them on the cable running over our heads.

“CHECK STATIC LINES!”  It is imperative that your static line go from the cable overhead, through your hand, and over your shoulder to the parachute on your back.  Underneath your shoulder is bad juju, so you first check your own static line and then the line of the jumper in front of you.  If all appears to be well, you tap the helmet of the jumper in front of you and tell him “safe.”  This is passed forward until it gets to the Jump Master, who then shouts –

“CHECK EQUIPMENT!”  We repeat the command while running our hands along the brim of our helmet, our chinstrap, the buckle on our chest and then on each leg.  The last man in line, after checking his equipment, slaps the backside of the man in front of him and yells in his ear “OK!”  The command is passed forward until it reaches the last man, who confidently thrusts his open hand into the face of the Jump Master and yells “ALL OK JUMP MASTER!”

The Jump Master slaps the jumper’s hand, then turns to the door.  He stomps down one foot, checking the stability of the ramp, then methodically but deliberately checks the door jambs for any protrusions or sharp edges – it’s a truly dramatic scene.  He then looks at the first jumper, affirmatively shoving his finger-extended hand in his face, and shouts “STAND IN THE DOOR!”  The first jumper then hands the Safety (a non-jumper there to ensure a smooth exit from the aircraft) his static line, puts a hand on each side of the reserve at his waist, and then turns so he is facing out the door.

I cannot see him (I am the eighth of ten jumpers on my side of the airplane), but I have no doubt his eyes are as big as Oreos, his pulse racing, breathing heavy, his brow littered with sweat.  But not me.  I am solid, coolly indifferent to jumping out the door.  The light at the front of the aircraft turns from red to green, the Jump Master shouts “GO!,” and we are moving.  I shuffle forward, hand the Safety my static line, and turn towards the door.

When one jumps out of an airplane moving at 130 knots 1200’ above the ground, one is supposed to exit the door by jumping up six inches and out thirty-six.  One is supposed to tuck one’s chin into one’s chest, keeping elbows in tight to the ribs and hands firmly gripping the sides of the reserve parachute hanging at one’s belly.  The jumper is then supposed to count to four – one thousand two thousand three thousand four thousand – then move hands from the reserve parachute to the risers of the opening parachute above his head.  Once the jumper confirms he has an open and untwisted parachute, he then looks for other jumpers, ensuring not only he is keeping a safe distance from the other jumpers, but also that he is falling at a rate of descent consistent with the other jumpers.  At approximately 100’, the jumper is supposed to reach up and pull down on the two risers in the direction opposite of any drift, keeping eyes squarely on the horizon.  One does not look down once below 100’, as he is supposed to “feel” the ground with the balls of his feet.  Once the jumper feels contact, he should execute his perfected PLF, landing expertly.

This is not how it works for me.  It turns out that I am totally and unequivocally mentally unprepared for the violence about to befall me.  As I move to exit the door, I am sucked out before I can get my first “thousand” out of my mouth.  My chin is in my chest, but only because the risers being yanked out of my pack have slammed my head forward, knocking my helmet down over my eyes in the process.  I have a tight body position – elbows in, feet and knees together – but only because I am scared shitless.  I can see a sliver of scenery from the underside of my helmet, and I watch it turn from tree to ground to tree to sky and back again.  I feel like a cigarette being flicked from a fast moving car.

I do not count to four thousand, mostly because my jaw is clenched shut but also because I am chanting, in my head, to the God of Agnostics: chute open chute open chute open chute open.  I stop tumbling, fix my helmet, and then look up to see my risers twisted.  As I was instructed, I quickly grab a riser in each hand, pulling apart as hard as my panic-induced arms will allow, and bicycle my legs like I stole something and my Schwinn is the getaway car.  I untwist, the risers parting to reveal a gloriously open, unobstructed, fully inflated chute.

She is beautiful.  I want to name her.  I think I want to name my children after her.  I sheepishly look around and collect myself, feeling like I just took a spill on my skateboard at a quiet intersection – did anyone see that? – and settle in to enjoy the ride.  I then notice that I am falling faster than everyone else in front of me.  This is not, I think, supposed to happen like this.  Shouldn’t the first one out the door also be the first one to the ground?  I crane my neck to see the jumpers behind me, but nothing – I am falling faster than them as well.  I look for the smoke pot on the ground, lit to help us see which way the wind is blowing so we can execute the appropriate PLF.  The smoke seems to be moving only upwards, directly at me, and I am falling only down, directly at it.  They did not teach me how I was supposed to land if I was falling straight down.

I hear a voice.  “AIRBORNE STOP LOOKING AT THE GROUND.”  I have no idea where the voice is coming from, and cannot see its source, but it reminds me to keep my eyes on the horizon.  I need to feel the ground as I land, first touching with the balls of my feet, then calves, then thigh, then butt, then pull-up muscle.  This PLF, I think, needs to be a good one, because I am falling really, really fast.

I do, in fact, feel the ground with the balls of my feet.  A microsecond later I feel the ground with my ass, and then, like it’s the tail end of a childhood game of “crack the whip,” I feel the ground with the back of my head.  I have skipped my second, third, and fifth points of contact but added a sixth.  I lay there for a few seconds, spread eagle, partially disoriented but mostly grateful to be on the ground and alive.  When I sit up, I see a Sergeant Airborne (the source of the voice I heard) sitting on a cooler, only about fifteen feet from me.  His right hand, holding the bull horn, is draped lazily over his right knee.  His head is hanging down, and I can tell he is laughing.  I give him a “what the f**k” look, and he swings the bullhorn up to his lips.

“ARE YOU OK AIRBORNE?”

“FUCK NO I’M NOT OK!  That hurt.”  He laughs.  He goes back to the bullhorn.  “YOU HAVE TO TWIST YOUR BODY AIRBORNE.”

“When?,” I ask.  Because there is absolutely no time between my feet and ass and head hitting the ground.  But there are already more jumpers floating down, so I gather up my equipment and start running across the drop zone to the staging area.  I am the first one back, by a good five minutes.

Jumps two, three, and four go much the same, though on my second jump I land on a packed road rather than the tilled ground, seeing stars after my head hits; on my fourth jump I am dragged across the drop zone for ten feet or so before I can unhook the chute.  I have no idea why I fall faster than everyone else – I’m really not that much bigger – but for all subsequent jumps I make sure I am the last one out the door so that I will not interfere with anyone else as I come down.  I still make it back to the staging area first. For each jump I am progressively more nervous, but loathe them all equally.  We jump twice on the first day and twice on the second day, needing only one jump on day three to get our fifth, and Airborne-qualifying, jump.

The last day comes early.  We have to be at formation by 3:30 am, and we silently run the mile to the airfield.  Once we get there we practice exiting from both doors of the mock aircraft and go through our practice PLFs for Sergeant Airborne – I am, admittedly, phoning it in at this point, as I have yet to have a PLF work for me.  We eat a cold MRE for breakfast.  We are in the harness – combat load for jump five – by 6:15 am.  This morning my squad will be on the second aircraft, and I am very much looking forward to being on the ground and out of this torture device of a parachute harness as soon as possible.  There are a limited number of Jump Masters, and they do double-duty both for the Jump Master Personnel Inspection in the harness shed and as the Jump Masters on the aircraft, so once we’re inspected, we can’t get back out of the harness.  I don’t drink water so I won’t have to pee, and pass time trying new ways to sit on the wooden benches to alleviate some of the pain.

The first jumpers are scheduled to get on the plane at 1000 hours, but the hour comes and goes.  Then eleven.  Today is overcast, and we need the clouds to be no lower than 1700’ – 1200’ is jump altitude, but we’re required to have 500’ of clearance.  I ask a passing Air Force pilot about the ceiling: Only 700’.  The clock reads noon.  The sergeant in charge (NCOIC) gets a waiver from the commander so we can jump at 1000’ instead of 1200’.  But the clouds are still only at 900’.  I volunteer to jump from 900’.  I volunteer to jump from 700’, 500’, whatever it takes to get out of this harness.  It’s now one o’clock.  A soldier two down from me passes out from dehydration.  We yell for Sergeant Airborne, two of us clumsily unhooking the passed out soldier from his gear.  The NCOIC unsuccessfully tries to get the commander to allow us to drop combat gear.  Another soldier wets his pants, the rest of us informed by the NCOIC conducting his end of the conversation with another Sergeant Airborne over the loudspeaker (“WHY IS ONE NINE EIGHT GETTING OUT OF HIS GEAR?”  Seconds pass. “DID HE GET THE PARACHUTE WET?”  More seconds.  “DID HE TELL ANYONE HE HAD TO GO?”).

At 1345 hours – one forty-five pm, and seven and one half hours after getting into the harness – Sergeant Airborne comes over the loudspeaker.  “CHALKS FIVE AND SIX, STAND UP AND FACE THE AIRFIELD.”  At this point, there is neither elation nor relief.  I want to get out of the harness but am, to be honest, fairly apprehensive about this last jump.  I will exit the door, no doubt, but I am not particularly looking forward to it.  We trudge out the door, wait for the aircraft, walk up the back of the ramp, and sit.

And then?  And then.  And then.  And then, over the airplane radio, music.  No, not music, but an anthem.  The anthem of my senior year of college, Everlast’s opus, that homage to kicking ass, self-aggrandizement, and yes, jumping around.  And why not?  Why not jump around?  I’m about to exit an airplane with fifty pounds of crap slung off my body like an overloaded bandito, and I deserve to serve your ass like I’m John McEnroe.  I deserve a little jumping around.  A smile replaces my grimace as I drift back to 1993, sitting on our dryer in the filthy basement of the Green House, my friends around me smoking a joint as we stare together at the wood floor above us, pulsating with the synched bacchanalian jumps of a hundred of our closest friends living the dream.  Over the plane radio it begins, pack it up, pack it in, let me begin, I came to win, and the Jump Master is literally packing us in.  He seats one of us, then makes us lift our rucksacks up as high as possible as he squeezes someone else into the seat directly across.  There is barely room for one person with a ruck, but he needs to squeeze thirty per side.  He makes everyone raise their hands in the air (get up, stand up, come on throw your hands up) as he shoves us to the back of the plane.  But I do not care.  I am 37 and have been sitting on a wood bench for almost eight hours and I have to pee and there’s a metal bar grinding into my shin and I don’t care, because across from me I see an ROTC cadet, a young kid looking all of his twenty years, mouthing – yelling – the words to Jump Around and I cannot help but be overcome because this is one of those days, one of those moments that doesn’t come around all that often but when it does, it reminds me that I really, really like what I do.

I exit the aircraft fifteenth of fifteen and am flung from the door like litter.  My chute opens – no twists – and I watch as I pass fourteen other parachutists on my way down.  I pull the release lever for my rucksack at about 200’, and it dangles on its cord thirty feet below me.  I find the smoke pot to gauge the wind; it’s pushing me to my left.  At 100’ I reach up and grab the two right risers and pull down as hard as I can, my eyes on the horizon.  I feel the ground with the balls of my feet, then my left calf, then my left thigh, my left butt cheek, and finally my left pull-up muscle.  I keep my elbows in front of my face, my momentum swinging my feet and knees – held firmly together – up and over.  I unhook the parachute and start to get out of my equipment, and hear a Sergeant Airborne through his bullhorn: “NICE LANDING SIR.”

I want to hug somebody.  Instead, as I reel in my parachute, I utter, under my breath, that one word I have heard over and over so many times the last three weeks, to the point I never want to hear it again:

Airborne.

[1] For this exercise, stand with your feet shoulder width apart, arms extended out and parallel to the ground.  Keeping your arms straight, move your hands upward until they touch, then return them to shoulder level.  This is a four count exercise – one, two, three (one!), one, two three (two!).  Do 200 of these.  Seriously.  Now do push-ups.  Now do more overhead claps.

[2] “Joe” is a slangy name given to soldiers of any rank below that of sergeant, and it should convey to you a vivid image of his idiosyncrasies.  Joe owns both an XBox and a PlayStation.  Joe took his enlistment bonus and bought an ’08 Ford Mustang GT, financing the balance with a double-digit APR.  Joe smokes – he’s likely to chew as well – and has a tribal tattoo on his arm and shoulder.  He owns denim shorts, and frequently sports them with a “Linkin’ Park” concert t-shirt and a DC skateboards hat.  Sometimes you have to remind Joe that he needs to wash between his toes.  Though he likes girls, Joe’s not real sure how to relate to them, and so is prone to do things like flicking or punching them in the arm, much like a fourth-grader lustily reacting to the early pangs of puberty.  Joe has a big heart, with which he isn’t entirely sure how to deal.  Joe works hard, and most importantly, Joe will do anything for his fellow soldiers (and by proxy, you), including but not limited to: lie, display common sense-defying acts of loyalty, steal, provide back-up in a fist fight, assist in the cross-border transportation of marijuana, and dive on a grenade.

 

[3] Recounting here the definition of “teabagging” is simply too much for me, so I’ll instead refer you to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=teabagging.  Reader beware.

[4] Army Rangers and Special Forces wear shorts consisting of essentially the same material, sometimes referred to as “Ranger Panties.”  The shorts are typical of what you’d see on any world-class marathon runner, expect Marines and Rangers aren’t usually built like world-class marathon runners.  They’re built like, well, Marines and Rangers, and so the shorts are really, really short and really, really thin.

[5] The system works like this: inside the aircraft and a little over 6’ from the floor are two cables running the length of the airplane.  On each soldier’s back is a parachute, with a nylon “static line” starting at the bag holding the parachute intact, protruding out of the pack and then over your shoulder.  At the end of the static line is a metal hook.  This metal hook goes onto the static line, and when you jump out of the aircraft, the hooked line pulls the bag and parachute out of your pack.  You are hooked to your hopefully opening parachute by four “risers,” pieces of think nylon webbing that run from the chute to your harness.

 

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Going Hemingway

Quito to Baños and Back Again/8-12 April, 2008

Is there a more harrowing opening scene in modern cinema – outside Saving Private Ryan – than the first ten minutes of Alive?  Is there one among us who didn’t experience an empathetic tightening of the glutes, an involuntary clenching of teeth, a collective release of breath once that doomed plane skidded and tumbled to a snowy stop?  The 1972 crash – loaded with an Uruguayan high school alumni rugby team – resulted in 29 dead and 16 survivors spending 72 days high in the brutally cold Andean cordillera before they were finally rescued.  In addition to the 1993 movie, the post-crash events spawned the delightfully macabre bumper sticker Rugby Players Eat Their Dead, which is, in fact, how those 16 survivors lived to tell their grizzly story.

As I readied for my two-week trip to Ecuador and Peru, my own desperate thoughts of how I might live should my TACA Air airplane crash-land in the Andes had taken refuge in my traveling companion for the total of my nine flights over a two-week period: Mac would provide me plenty of much needed sustenance, if need be, because he’s a good friend, and because I could – I would – eat him.  I would.  Mac is a big man.  Or at least he was.  It seems Mac is in love – to a vegetarian, to boot – and he’s a good twenty pounds lighter than the last time I saw him.  Fortunately about every third Latino getting on our flight carried a box of fried chicken,[1] so I wouldn’t have to eat Mac after all.

Mac and I had but two goals for our trip to Ecuador and Peru – to see a soccer game and to see Macchu Piccu.  The rest would be unplanned, allowing us the freedom and flexibility to go where we wanted when we wanted, to stay or go, to take the backpacker-highway or the road less traveled, to drink heavily or not at all.  We opted for each.

Ecuador: Land of Little People

Our first stop is Quito, the capital of Ecuador and at 9,200 ft, way too close to the sun.  It takes me less than a day to get a solid base burn that lasts throughout our trip (none of my Latino DNA, apparently, is in my epidermis, and by the end of the trip a cloud of dead skin sloughs off me each time I remove my fleece).  But our first afternoon starts overcast, so we kill time with a bowl of ceviche and the first of our many, many Pisco Sours.  Bitterly and legally disputed over, Pisco is a native drink of both Peru and Chile but served everywhere in the region.  During Spanish colonial rule, imported grapes were the beginnings of what became a hugely successful wine industry.  But in 1641, King Philip banned the import of wine, causing the Peruvians (or was it the Chileans?) to find an alternate, yet still alcoholic, use for their grapes.  Voilà, Pisco.  Add some egg whites, Simple syrup, lime juice and a dash of bitters, and you have the Pisco Sour.  Though it tastes like a more acidic Margarita, it sneaks up on you like jungle juice at a frat party.  I blame it on the altitude, but the three drinks we had as we waited out the rain, sounding all the world like machine-gun fire as it fell on the fiberglass covered courtyard, left us both feeling adequately prepared for our two-weeks in South America.

It did not, however, adequately prepare us for our first South American riot.  There are a lot of cabs in Ecuador – far more cabs and buses, it seems, than private cars – some government owned and operated, some not.  The drivers of the some not, on this Tuesday afternoon, are restless, and express their displeasure by clogging the streets and hurling rocks, bottles, fists and feet at every passing yellow cab.  There are thousands of men chanting and kicking yellow-cab ass as the cars accelerate through the gauntlet of protesters, and Mac and I get close enough to film but far enough away to stay out of the way of the frequent errant projectiles.  We stand safely, we think, next to the sole police officer we see, who is acting on the situation largely by looking the other way and texting messages on his cell phone.  An ice-cream truck drives by, “Jingle Bells” drifting lazily from its loudspeaker.

The average height of a Brazilian male, says www.shortsupport.org,[2] is just about 5′7″.  The vast rain forest and towering Andes Mountains separating Ecuador (and Peru) from Brazil must include a genetic decline, because Ecuadoreans seem to me to be much, much shorter.  Mac and I look like genetic freaks, never more so than when we fold ourselves and our backpacks into public transportation, be it the hilariously miniature Daihatsu cabs – we frequently bottomed out over speed bumps and potholes – or the back seat of the Quito-Ambato-Baños bus we took after our third day in Ecuador.  The four-hour journey began with a Tourettic DVD salesman pacing the aisle of the bus for the entire first half of the trip, talking to no one in particular but repeating the same sales pitch with the dedication and regularity of a time-condensed call to prayer coming from a minaret.  He would start at the back of the bus, dropping cellophane covered DVDs on each passenger’s lap, making his way to the front.  A passenger indicated his interest by picking up the DVD – no matter if you were picking it up simply to give it back.  On the salesman’s return trip, untouched DVDs went back into his canvas bag, touched DVDs invited the hard sell.  He warmed to us after he found we were American, and we learned from him that a) Columbian women were hot; b) he had family in Florida; c) Columbian women were hot; d) Columbia was the third largest country in South America; e) Columbians liked war; and f) Columbian women were hot.

We rolled into Baños around ten at night, and our desire to both get us into a beer and out of the rain prompted us to break routine and follow the first teenage hucksters accosting us.  They took us to the Hostel Freddy, where we were given two rooms – mine smelling like farts and cigar smoke –  for $5 each, a pretty good deal until I was woken by the sounds of the bus station, just a block from my single-pane windowed room.  Mac, no doubt, slept through the night, lulled by the sounds of his own snores.  Five dollars a night might compensate for farts and cigar smoke, it does not make up for unwanted wake-up calls.

Baños, named for the natural mineral baths spread throughout the town, is hemmed in by towering mountains and the Tungurahua volcano, active enough that this city is still clearing eruption residue covering a part of the only paved road leading to town.  Mac and I climbed to the top of one of the ranges, braving muddy trails, no trails, thirty degree inclines with no trails, jungle-thick flora, fifty-cent piece sized spiders, diving vultures, and an overzealous guard dog (after starting down the wrong trail, we asked a local woman how to get to the “antennas.”  Her prophetic answer: “take a cab”).  We walked the road back down, unsuccessful in our attempts to hitch a ride from either of the two cars passing us, pausing only to accept the offer of a local farmer to take one of his granadilla, a fruit looking like an orange on the outside and a pomegranate on the inside, but with the consistency of mucus.[3]

We spend the afternoon as the only customers in a vitriolic Dutch woman’s café, listening to her espouse her theories on American politics and calling George Bush a “fucker.”  Her Ecuadorean husband walks past us hangdog, and I am grateful I am not him.  On our second and last night in Baños, we visit the mineral baths, where we account for all four hundred something pounds of gringo, our board shorts looking like Capris in comparison to the locals’ Speedos and boy shorts.

The morning brings us symmetry: As we get into our cab taking us to the two and a half hours to the Quito airport, the radio plays Europe’s The Final Countdown, that traveler’s anthem we’ve heard in Mexico and all over Scandinavia.

la vaquera

[1] KFC is the Starbucks of Ecuador, but every box of chicken on our flight was an unknown brand.  If anyone knows this phenomenon, please let me know.

 

[2] Short Persons Support’s mission is to a) Support and provide reference material to persons of short stature; b) Raise awareness of the social and economic issues facing short people; and c) Provide inspiration to short people to help better their lives and attitudes.  All I want them to do is tell me the average height of an Ecuadorean male.

[3] Later, in Lima, we explained this story to some other travelers in an attempt to recall the fruit’s name.  “It’s not fruit,” stated a sassy Canadian.  “Don’t tell me it’s not fruit,” I answered, “it was sweet, it had a peel, it had seeds on the inside.”  Or something like that.  “No,” she answered back, “it’s snot fruit.”

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Call to Macchiato


Addis Ababa, Ethiopia/March 16, 2007

It’s 5:15 am and I’m woken by the call to prayer being blasted outside my window. Though spoken in Amharic – a language uniquely Ethiopian – it sounds remarkably similar to a Native American chant as I fade in and out of sleep. My Malarone-inspired dreams take me out of Addis Ababa and back to the Nevada desert where I sit and watch a tribal counsel quickly go from group chant to an argument over one guy’s Marine Corps jacket. This dream is only slightly less bizarre than the one I had the night before where Lisa Bonet and I were firmly entrenched in a life of domestic wedded bliss. But that’s for another time – the call to prayer has gotten louder – and so I’m awake for my first full day in Addis Ababa.

This is the poorest country I’ve ever been to. At 6:45 a.m. our part of the city was already awake and moving, and the early sun filtered through the mix of dust and pollution gave a look of a war-torn country. Beggars are everywhere, matched in numbers by the homeless lined in neat rows along the sidewalk, still sleeping. There are piles of garbage scavenged over by mangy dogs, and sewage drains double, apparently, as toilets. But the city is alive and well, and it has all the characteristics of fast-paced city life. There are 7 million people in Addis and its suburbs, and it seems like most of them are out walking. The taxis are mini-busses, and they pull over toward the sidewalk at designated stops, slowing enough to allow the guy hanging out the window to scream the destination to no one in particular. You can hear them coming and going, bus after bus driving down the road with a man standing outside the passenger window like your dog letting his ears flap in the breeze. The streets are lined with stores, shop after shop selling car batteries, then shop after shop selling rebar, then shop after shop selling tires – it continues on and on. My instinct says they need a mini-mall, but then there would be no reason to ever leave your own neighborhood, thusly losing your connection with the rest of the city.

Ethiopia is the home of coffee, and they serve the best macchiatos I’ve ever had. Mark and I had four of them (for less than a dollar) while we stood outside on the street, watching daily life go by. I left my video camera running and almost every child that walked by made a face or smiled. This country has over four million orphans, and many of them seem to be on the street (part of this trip is to help some orphanages, so more on that later). We had dinner at the “expensive” western restaurant, which had average food but was remarkably nice and definitely western, replete with the ubiquitous older white male escorting the younger, really really hot brown girl (I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve been).

One story before I end: At dinner I met a friend of Mark’s, an Ethiopian woman who runs one of the orphanages. She’s actually from the northern part of Ethiopia, an area named Tigray, and left this country when she was eleven years old due to a civil war. She and her cousins (one parent died, and the other stayed behind) walked to Sudan (she doesn’t remember the distance, only that it took a few months) and then lived in Khartoum with an uncle and several other relatives in a single dirt-floored room. In Sudan, she was treated as a second-class citizen until she left, at 17, to go to Boston. She had never been to America, spoke no English, and had experienced neither electricity nor running water – let alone boarded an airplane and flown across the world. She taught herself English, did well enough in school to get a scholarship to a university where she ran track, and came back here to Ethiopia to help the children of this country. It’s an incredible story, but it’s commonplace here (at least up to the fly to America part).

More later – I wanted to send some quick thoughts – but it’s 5:45 here and time for a macchiato.

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Sudanese Refugees Got No Game

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia/ March 20, 2007

Can you get AIDS if you rub your eyes after you’ve handled a snot-nosed HIV-positive two year old? And is there irony in orphaned Ethiopian girls wearing t-shirts with the words FEELGIRL emblazoned across the front? Today was powerful, so I have to lead with sarcasm while I absorb it all.

My days overseas usually start with a hangover, but today started with a trip to Mother Theresa’s AIDS orphanage in Addis Ababa, where Sister Maria (she didn’t even know the words to “How do you Solve a Problem Like Maria”, the silly nun) has taken care of thousands of kids over the last ten years. She, her support staff and 400 kids – all HIV positive, with a few having full blown AIDS – live in an incredibly clean compound where the kids receive schooling, lots of attention, and medical care (they now get ARVs, and only four children died last year). Sister Maria runs the place like, well, a Catholic nun, and I witnessed her order three loan officers, there to check her books, to “not leave without making a donation.” We visited two other orphanages of varying quality, and were served macchiatos at each – I think I had seven today, and am clearly subsidizing my beer intake by sucking down as much caffeine as possible. The children are polite and well behaved, and seem much like kids anywhere, with the exception of the very young ones – they practically attacked me and the other males in the group. Orphanage staff is almost exclusively female, and toddlers, it seems, sometimes want to be held by men. I spend most of the day conflicted. Conflicted because I’m white; conflicted because I am, relatively, loaded; conflicted because I’m a foreigner (“forengee“); conflicted because trips like the one I’m on are almost always faith-based (“Jesus lovers,” I call them (me?), though the Ethiopians spell Jesus with a “G.” My name, of course, is Gay); conflicted because I’m not a Jesus-lover. The people with whom I’m traveling are incredibly kind, motivated, and genuinely concerned about these kids, and are clearly moved by a higher power. But I remember what Townes Van Zandt said about being a guitar player: if you truly want to be one, then that’s all you can be. You have to be willing to give up money, security, livelihood, a job – all the cholesterol in your life preventing you from mastering a blues scale.

So if you truly want to live your life for Jesus, then shouldn’t you do nothing else but live it? We roll into the orphanage, hold some kids, drop off some soccer balls, then roll back out for a post hand-sanitized macchiato. Does it really matter? Does it make a difference? Mull it over along with me.

I skipped the last stop of the day, a tour of the “Institute for the Destitute and Dying,” opting instead for a walk with a friend through the alleys of the Kaliti neighborhood. Kids literally run the streets, most in flip-flops, some barefoot, the older ones in better shoes and school uniforms. I saw a Britney Spears poster; an ad for Tupac’s latest (I think, I’ve lost track); tailors sitting outside, running old-school Singers; VW mini-vans and motorcycles flying through the streets (I’ve cursed exactly once on this trip – I swear – and it was when a motorcycle swerved to pretend to hit me. I yelled out “fucker,” which I immediately regretted after realizing the number of little kids constantly following us). We stopped at a gate reading Jesuit Refugee Service Center, and as it opened to let a car enter, I witnessed the most delightful image I’ve seen thus far – Sudanese refugees playing basketball. They were tall, lanky, incredibly dark, and awful at hoops. I mimed my 20% accurate set shot, and a young kid named Ricard waved us in. Matt and I spent the next hour at 7700 feet running up and down a concrete court with bent, net-less hoops; me on a belly full of pizza and macchiato trying to set picks on 6’8″ 130-pound Sudanese teenagers running from who knows what.

Africa is growing on me.